Global Citizen Year
A visual identity and website refresh for the San Francisco nonprofit
With the advent of a second, virtual program offering, Global Citizen Year hired Simpatico to assess and create a new brand architecture and hierarchy to successfully market and recruit for both programs. They also enlisted our team's help to update the website's user journeys, driving donations and conversions.
what we did together
client industry
New programming warrants a new approach
For its first 10 years, Global Citizen Year had been a nonprofit organization offering 1 program: a global gap year fellowship. In April 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, Global Citizen Year temporarily suspended its global fellowship and launched a second gap year offering, Global Citizen Academy. Given that up until this point, the program and nonprofit’s messaging were interchangeable, the organization asked Simpatico to revisit the nonprofit’s messaging and positioning, as well as update both the logomark and website.
An updated logo
The general consensus was that the brand language was feeling a bit dated: the team was ready to remove the silhouette, and wanted to both simplify and modernize the look and feel. We worked closely with leadership and staff to create a new logomark: one that felt in sync with the existing visual identity (created by Red Antler), and could easily support the two “subbrands”: the Fellowship and Academy programs.
Updated website designs with new messaging
Previously, the strategy was to focus primarily on ‘selling’ the trips to prospective students. However, in addition to the new programming, the leadership team also wanted to pivot to include more information about the ‘why’ (the organizational mission) to invigorate supporters and funders. Over the course of several weeks, we worked with the team to refine their messaging and translate it to website copy.
Within one week, the website analytics showed the redesign's striking improvements in bounce rates and conversions.
- -12.15% Overall website bounce rate
- -17.53% Home page bounce rate
- -14.45% Academy page bounce rate
- -35.2% Fellowship page bounce rate